With the hope of finding new drugs and unlocking the secrets of the genetic code, companies have aggressively pursued technology for handling biological materials. One technology area of particular interest includes liquid handling and/or high throughput screening, which attempts to process hundreds or thousands of samples of substances in parallel to rapidly determine a property of those substances. Typically, a first set of substances are provided on a chip or substrate while a second set of substances are applied to the first set of substances to identify any useful interactions. Systems for performing high throughput screening and/or liquid handling include various functions such as filling reservoirs, aspirating liquids from those reservoirs, and dispensing fluids into testing reservoirs. Liquids are ultimately deposited onto substrates, such as a slide, or into holding reservoirs such as a microplate with an array of wells.
Unfortunately, despite heavy pursuit of simplification in this technology area, these high throughput screening systems or liquid handling systems, are still fairly cumbersome. Fluids are placed into reservoirs for storage using one type of device, such as a micropipette system, and then using a separate type of device such as a quill pin system, fluids are drawn from the reservoirs and then dispensed into other wells, onto chips as arrays, or onto slides. With each additional step of handling, the chances increase of making errors in maintaining the intended state of the biological material. Moreover, the systems for performing these tasks can be rather bulky since separate subsystems are used for each desired function, for example, these systems may include a micropipette for filling, a microplate for holding a substance or receiving test reagents, a dispensing mechanism for dispensing fluids from the microplate onto a slide, etc.
In addition, conventional liquid handling systems use relatively larger volumes of biological materials due to the larger size and/or lack of precision associated with conventional liquid dispensing devices. Conventional liquid handling systems also typically require frequent steps of washing and/or rinsing components of the system, which wastes time and resources.
For these reasons, among others, systems for liquid handling of biological materials have yet to achieve their full potential.